Pages

Friday, May 23, 2014

Shattered Planet: An Interview with Tanya Short

This
is the first interview I've ever done for What a Horrible Night to
Have a Curse..., and it's with an old friend from my days in Japan,
Tanya Short. She is the creative director of a new video game design
company, Kitfox Games, and their new game Shattered Planet, a sci-fi
Rogue-like, is now available for free download for your smart phone
or tablet.

Tanya
and I met about ten years ago, and we played together in a Trinity
campaign run by her S.O. Brent. Later, Brent and Tanya played in a
short Classic D&D game that I ran just as I was getting back into old
school games and away from the d20 system, before they left Japan.

I'm
happy to help her spread the word about her new game – and I'm a
bit envious of all of you who can download it and start playing it
today. It's not yet available for East Asian markets, and I'm way
too lazy to figure out how to root my smart phone in order to
download it now. :D Anyway, on to the interview.

Interview
with Tanya Short of Kitfox Games

Tanya
X. Short is a professional game designer who worked on MMOs such as
Age
of Conan
and The
Secret World
before making the leap to indie. She founded Kitfox Games
(http://www.kitfoxgames.com)
with 3 other devs in Montreal, Canada, acting as their Creative
Director. She’s lived in four countries and has a cat that sits at
the breakfast table.

LG:What
is your gaming background?

TS:
There was a huge age gap between my brothers and I, so most of my
gaming was done solo. My first love was Bubble
Bobble
on the NES, or on road trips, Link’s
Awakening.
As a teen, living in an extremely rural area, I got really into
online games as part of my social life – I literally spent 12 hours
at a time role-playing in MUDs (textual virtual worlds). Although
EverQuest
was available by then, I preferred the imaginativeness of text, and
even spent a year or two after college volunteering as a community
manager for a commercial MUD. From there, I guess it was natural I’d
get into designing MMOs!

LG:
How did you get into game development?

TS:
I am one of the few who went to school for it! I went to an extremely
practical master’s degree program called the Guildhall, which is a
satellite campus of Southern Methodist University in Texas. It’s
staffed by industry veterans and has (or had, at the time) an
extremely high hiring rate, because they really focus on what you
need to get hired – a good portfolio, team experience, and finished
projects. My first offers to join the industry were from ArenaNet,
Big Huge Games, and Funcom, in Norway. I accepted the Funcom position
because… well, who turns down a job in Norway? Not me!

LG:
What sort of work were you doing
for thebig
MMO companies like Age of Conan and TheSecret
World?

TS:
I started out as an A.I. Designer, which is their word for ‘scripter’
– creating enemy behaviours, boss fights and such using their
light-weight, high-level programming tools. But I was so enthusiastic
and opinionated about social features and guild structures, I ended
up creating a whole feature from scratch, which is pretty unusual
after a game’s launch! I pitched and lead the strike team
developing the Guild Renown feature, which is basically guild
levelling (before World of Warcraft did theirs!). On The Secret
World, I did various design stuff basically, working mostly
independently… various missions, puzzles, improvements to the hub
cities, etc. I was the designer who pulled together the “Dreaming
One” levels, which are these surreal experiences in ice caves, in a
dreamscape. It wasn’t my vision (that was all Ragnar Tornquist),
but I filled in all of the detail and gameplay. I also made the
Albion Theatre, and all the vendors in the cities – my favorite, of
course, being the taco vendor ghoul in London.

TS:
I have a serious love of the political. Keeping secrets is a unique
pleasure that most video games don’t incorporate, but which I
highly value. Most of my favorite tabletop characters had a Big
Secret they were keeping from the party. They never ended up getting
found out, but it still added layers of meaning and drama to every
moment of play! And although it’s not quite a tabletop game,
Werewolf
remains one of my favorites, despite its deep flaws – nothing can
replace the joy of innocently lying to your friends.

LG:
Tell us about one of your most memorable tabletop RPG characters.
Who was she (he) and what game system was it? What were his/her
goals? What made that PC so memorable?

TS:
My favorite character was probably Kaena. She was a fun-loving bard
on the surface! But she secretly ran a spy network, working for a
cult that was trying to revive an old, dead god. So every time the
party found any treasure, she’d refuse to sell it (making up just
about any excuse) until she had done a complete lore check on it
and/or checked with her secret contacts. The rest of the party
thought she was just a hoarder or a collector of some kind… and
they never learned differently since the game ended before her true
intentions were revealed! I’ll just always remember having five
secret notes queued up to give the GM every time we went back to
town!

LG:
How did Kitfox Games form?

TS:
Here in Montreal, there’s an incubator/accelerator program called
Execution Labs, where indie teams can come and get training in
business development and marketing, plus they’ll pay you while you
make whatever game you want! So when I heard about an opening there,
I looked around and put together a team with other local indies!

LG:
Introduce your compatriots at Kitfox Games – Who are they and how
did you all meet?

TS:
No matter what I say, you’ll never understand how awesome they are
to work with! :D

Xin
Ran Liu is a traditional concept artist with amazing digital painting
skills, but who also makes his own little game projects on the side
in GameMaker. He does just about everything art-related in our games.

Mike
Ditchburn is our lead programmer. He makes TONS of game prototypes,
like just about every day, and owns over 300 board games.

Jongwoo
Kim is our gameplay programmer, and he actually was trained as a game
designer, so he has good intuitions on that side, too.

We
all met at a local indie meet-up group here in Montreal, but we
didn’t really know each other very well until we started working
together. We weren’t even sure it was all going to work out until
we did the Indie Speed Run game jam together last October… but the
results were pretty cool, and we were finalists! You can play the
results here: kitfoxgames.com/Jams/Sculptorgeist.html
Now we’re like siblings. :)

LG:
What has been thebiggest
challenge for Kitfox Games as a small start up?

TS:
Getting our name out there is a huge challenge! We’re nobodies! We
are planning on having a crowdfunding campaign for Moon
Hunters (our next game)
this summer, but it’s terrifying because, you know, we’re not
Chris Avellone or Tim Schafer. We’re just 4 devs trying to make
awesome games, and we have to convince people not only to try our
games, but trust that we’re worth giving money to! So we’re
working hard trying to earn that trust, which is why we decided to
make the mobile version of Shattered
Planet free to play –
to get more people to try the game.

LG:
Tell us about Shattered Planet - what are its selling points?

TS:
As a clone of a space captain, it’s your job to explore a deadly
alien planet that’s different every time. It’s a solid little
game – easy to pick up, but with surprising amounts of strategy,
once you start trying to optimise. Over and over, the reviews we get
from critics and players compliment our artist Xin’s hand-painted
art style, as well as the quirky writing (by yours truly). I don’t
mean to brag! It’s just that between your snarky alien assistant,
over a hundred items, and dozens of little choose-your-own adventure
type events, there’s plenty of room for sci-fi jokes, references,
and general silliness.

From the Kitfox Games website

LG:
Why did you decide to make it as a Rogue-like instead of another
style of game?

TS:
It was an accident! We actually initially set out to make a game
about exploring. We were trying to recapture that feeling of endless
potential from the early turns of Sid Meier’s Civilisation.
So we made a few different prototypes, and our favorite ended up
being styled as an RPG… and we realised a few weeks later that we
had accidentally re-invented the rogue-like.

LG:
Most Rogue-likes are fantasy
themed. Was it hard to implement thegame
style with a sci fi setting?

TS:
Not at all! It took a bit of courage, since we looked at the market
and competitors and didn’t see anything like it, but once you make
the mental shift, it’s easy. There’s a reason sci-fi and fantasy
go together so well – they are both really about humans embarking
on grand adventures, sometimes with monsters in the way.

LG:
What is thenumber
one reason I should download and play Shattered Planet right now?

TS:
Well, for one, it’s free! You can go download it and try for
yourself! And if you enjoy it but wish it were a premium purchase…
well, look for it on Steam in late June!

Also from the Kitfox Games website

LG:
What's in store for Kitfox Games in thefuture?

Well,
we’re probably always going to create infinite procedural games,
and with the amazing talent of our artist Xin
(http://www.xinranliu.com),
each game should be more gorgeous than the last. We already have more
plans on the back-burner, with hopes to release Moon
Hunters (http://www.moonhuntersgame.com/)
to Steam Early Access by Christmas. If you want to keep track of what
we’re up to, you can join our mailing list: http://eepurl.com/EbbjT

LG:
Many of my readers are part
of theDIY
centered Old School Renaissance, creating and self-publishing
tabletop RPG material. Do you have an advice for readers who
might be thinking of getting into computer/video game design?

TS:
It’s both easier and harder than you think! Start small – as
small as humanly possible -- but plan on everything taking quite a
bit longer to complete than you first think. But there are literally
DOZENS of free tools out there that are surprisingly powerful. Those
of you who are writerly should definitely check out Twine, which is a
free choose-your-own-adventure type tool that you can pick up and
figure out in 10 minutes or so!

And
this is more of a psychological trick than a game development
technique, but remember not to tell anyone what you’re working on
until after you’ve completed what you want to tell them! If
you “pre-brag”, excitedly telling someone what you will
do, you’re less likely to go through with it than if you wait until
after you actually have something to brag about!

LG:
Finally, on a personal note, any idea when Shattered Planet will
release in South Korea? ;)

TS:
Haha! Well, we were looking out for potential Asian partners for
proper localisation and publishing, but … we might give up on that
and release sometime this summer! Thanks for the poke!

LG:
Thanks for your time, Tanya! I'm really looking forward to playing
Shattered Planet. Hopefully some of my readers will enjoy it as
well.